Our final little tidbit from GDC 2013 last week was another session with BlackBerry's Sean Paul Taylor on developing games on BlackBerry 10. After walking us through how Unity works for BB10, Taylor showed us the Visual Studio plug-in that recently saw its gold 1.0 release. The BlackBerry 10 NDK ties in tightly enough with Visual Studio that developers don't need to worry about booting up another development environment, and instead feeding their BB10 work in with their standard workflow with Visual Studio.

I've generally been impressed with BlackBerry's approach to developer tools, and even though many game designers will opt instead to make their titles in Unity or some other similar engine, it's always good to have options. Devs can become very attached to their IDEs, and Visual Studio is a really important one to support.

BlackBerry developers, where do you do most of your work? Is Visual Studio a popular option for building games? If you're interested in getting started, you can check out some of the documentation here.

I have not done development on BlackBerry, but from my understanding Qt Creator has great support for BlackBerry development. I have used both Visual Studio and Qt Creator and Qt Creator is just so much more pleasant to work with (much faster, lighter weight, more customizable, more keyboard friendly, to name a few advantages). In fact, many developers at my company who have been long time Visual Studio users are switching to Qt Creator and love it.

So, this is cool, but not actually as cool as you might think. The impression I get is that this is STRICTLY for C/C++ development. While C++ apps can use Cascades libraries, that suggests to me that program flow/logic ALL has to be written in C/C++. Newbs need not apply.

.NET languages will NOT work here, so that rules out C# and VB.NET (sadly--I have a decent amount of experience with these).

I don't think it can even link against the Cascades libraries at all. I tried importing a Cascades project from Momentics into Visual Studios (with this plugin) and I was met with all kinds of errors in compilation.

I would love to see support for Cascades development in Visual Studios. As many have mentioned this is only for the NDK. Visual Studios is a far better base IDE than Eclipse is, in my opinion, and working with Eclipse (or Momentics as they've retitled it) is less than ideal.

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